Two months ago, Daniel Reeves offered me a remarkable bet. The terms:
1. Bryan reads Climate Shock. But feel free to skip the parts about short-term extreme weather events — that’s probably least compelling and least relevant to the long-term cost/benefit analysis.
2. Danny puts up $500 to Bryan’s $250 on Bryan doing a 180 on some important policy question related to climate change, such as supporting carbon pricing or subsidizing clean energy or carbon capture tech. (Merely increasing Bryan’s support for repeal of existing government policies doesn’t count).
3. Bryan automatically loses the bet if he doesn’t finish the book by January 1, 2022.
I have now read Climate Shock, and I’m afraid that the book didn’t change my mind on any important policy question related to climate change. I really did strive to be fair, and I did warn Reeves that he was overestimating my open-mindedness. That said, I did win – and the noble Reeves has already paid me.
My main thoughts on the book:
1. Wagner and Weitzman place huge weight on the “fat tails” of climate disaster, and fixate on a 10% chance of hitting 6°C global warming.
Climate change belongs to a rare category of situations where it’s extraordinarily difficult to put meaningful bounds on the extent of possible planetary damages. Focusing on getting precise estimates of the damages associated with eventual global average warming of 4°C (7°F), 5°C (9°F), or 6°C (11°F) misses the point. The appropriate price on carbon is one that will make us comfortable enough to know that we will never get to anything close to 6°C (11°F) and certain eventual catastrophe. Never, of course, is a strong word, since we know the chance of any of these temperatures happening even based on today’s atmospheric concentrations can’t be brought to zero.
One thing we know for sure is that a greater than 10 percent chance of eventual warming of 6°C (11°F) or more— the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it— is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment. With the immense longevity of atmospheric carbon dioxide, “wait and see” would amount to nothing other than willful blindness.
Why doesn’t this change my mind?
a. I’m not remotely surprised that Wagner and Weitzman say there is a 10% chance of disaster. Given that they’re writing a book about climate change, I actually expected a higher probability.
b. I’m not qualified to assess the research underlying this probability, but I suspect that it is overestimated because (a) predictions of disaster are almost always wrong, and (b) climate experts have a strong and obvious left-wing bias.
c. Furthermore, it is quite clear that climate experts were heavily left-wing long before they started studying climate. So it is hardly surprising that the smartest people working in this area are so pessimistic. They started with a more talented team of advocates.
d. Wagner and Weitzman don’t consider the total disasters that might result from aggressive climate policy. Like what? Most obviously, their policies keep the world poor, hence war-prone, for many extra decades. Which in turn raises the probability of World War III before 2100 from say 10% to 15%.
2. Wagner and Weitzman are extremely optimistic about geoengineering, yet childishly reject it.
This is where we’ll end up: with the specter of geoengineering. Everything we know about how humans behave, and how they don’t, leads us to believe that— unless political leaders muster the courage to act, decisively and soon— the world will inevitably be facing some painful choices. It may be folly to believe that technology (in the form of geoengineering) can, once again, bail out society and the planet from the worst of planetary emergencies. But that’s the world we are moving toward.
Talk of geoengineering, much like uncertainty, isn’t very comforting. It shouldn’t be. It’s certainly not an excuse for inaction on sensible climate policy, just as we shouldn’t start smoking because an experimental lung cancer drug treatment showed some promise in a lab. The specter of geoengineering should be a clarion call for action. Decisive, and soon.
Why childish? Because when they actually discuss the evidence on geoengineering, it’s far more solid than “an experimental lung cancer drug treatment that showed some promise in a lab.”
We may hate the idea of countering amazing amounts of pollution with yet more pollution of a different type. But the entire enterprise is simply too cheap to ignore.
And it’s not like anyone would literally do as Mount Pinatubo did and dump 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. At the very least, given current technology and knowledge, the sulfur would likely be delivered in the form of sulfuric acid vapor. Sooner rather than later, we may be looking at particles specifically engineered to reflect as much solar radiation back into space with as little material as possible. That would mean less material to achieve the same impact. It may be a fleet of a few dozen planes flying around the clock. Some have gone as far as to calculate how many commercially available Gulfstream G650 jets it would take to haul the necessary materials. The specifics are indeed too specific. What matters is that the total costs are low, both compared to the damage carbon dioxide causes and the cost of avoiding that damage by reducing emissions.
Actual numbers are all over the place, and all of them are based on estimates, but most put the direct engineering costs on the order of $1 to 10 billion a year. Those are the engineering costs of getting temperatures back down to preindustrial levels. It’s not nothing, but it’s well within the reach of many countries and maybe even the odd billionaire.
If a ton of carbon dioxide emitted today costs $40 over its lifetime, we are talking pennies per equivalent ton. That’s three orders of magnitude lower, and it’s the exact parallel situation to the free-rider problem that has caused the problem in the first place. Instead of one person enjoying all the benefits of that cross-country round-trip and the other seven billion paying fractions of a penny each for the climate damages that one ton of carbon dioxide causes, now it’s one person or (more likely) one country being able to pay for the costs of geoengineering the entire planet — all potentially without consulting the other seven billion people.
The final clause clearly freaks them out. But why? They reasonably predict that geoengineering will start slowly. Are they really worried that “once the genie is out of the bottle,” some tropical countries will decide to freeze the rest of the planet to death? Or what?
Frankly, it looks like Wagner and Weitzman want to impoverish the world by many extra trillions of dollars to ensure that humanity’s savior is the United Nations instead of the United States or (horrors!) Elon Musk. Indeed, their objections are so flimsy that you could accuse them of being Straussian proponents of geoengineering. But that’s a stretch. Wagner and Weitzman sound like typical smart people under the spell of Social Desirability Bias. They care such more about solving climate change inoffensively than solving it cheaply.
3. Wagner and Weitzman barely mention nuclear power or the absurd regulatory burden under which it labors. This fits with the Social Desirability Bias story, and makes me further distrust them.
I freely grant that Climate Shock is one of the best alarmist books on its topic. Maybe the best such book. Alas, that’s not good enough to change my mind on climate policy.
READER COMMENTS
Roger D Barris
Nov 9 2021 at 10:13am
Point 3 is probably all you need to know.
Anyone writing a book called Climate Shock without at least seriously grappling with nuclear energy is prima facia wrong.
Daniel Reeves
Nov 9 2021 at 10:58am
To quote from my fuller reply to Bryan, which he’s kindly going to publish here on the blog, on the nuclear energy point:
I may be more trusting than you but I’d only have distrusted them on those grounds if they’d argued against nuclear energy. Wagner and Weitzman think policy intervention should be limited to carbon taxes. Nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon so they are implicitly pro-nuclear. I’m sure they’d agree about the absurd regulatory burden as well. They do spend a lot of time in the book on the absurdity of the current fossil fuel subsidies, which I’m sure you also despise.
Gene
Nov 9 2021 at 4:15pm
I haven’t read the book, but if the authors are actually pro-nuclear, why would they merely leave that endorsement implicit? Why not put it out there in no uncertain terms?
Matthias
Nov 10 2021 at 5:31am
Just speculating:
If at least part of your audience is rabidly anti nuclear, you might want to tread lightly so they still listen to your main message.
robc
Nov 10 2021 at 8:56am
To teach them something?
If they were pro-nuke, wouldnt they want them to change their mind?
Daniel Reeves
Nov 10 2021 at 12:16pm
Exactly. And the main message was carbon pricing.
Gabriel Weil
Nov 9 2021 at 11:13pm
It’s been a while since I read Climate Shock, but it’s not an accurate characterization of Wagner’s current views to say that he “thinks policy intervention should be limited to carbon taxes.” See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-09/the-numbers-behind-exxon-s-support-for-a-carbon-tax
Daniel Reeves
Nov 10 2021 at 12:28pm
That article is paywalled but I suspect you’re right and I was wrong about what other policies the authors support. I stand by the underlying points though, unless it turns out the authors are actually against nuclear energy.
I guess my point is that the book seems to sound the alarm about climate change in a pretty libertarian-friendly way.
I’d actually be interested to understand what a die-hard libertarian would say is the best policy for climate change, conditional on being convinced that there’s a real risk of 6 degrees of warming and that that much warming would be devastating for humanity. Geoengineering but no emissions mitigation?
Russell N Nelson
Nov 11 2021 at 12:25am
In other words, Wagner and Weitzman are stepping over dollars to pick up dimes.
Philo
Nov 11 2021 at 7:35pm
It seems that the production of greenhouse gases can be reduced greatly by switching to nuclear generation of electricity, in which case that certainly should be proclaimed loudly in a book on climate policy.
David C Jinkins
Nov 9 2021 at 11:25am
I thought the old Weitzman point is that even if there is a 1% chance of disaster, because it would be really bad, it would still be worth spending much more to prevent it. I presume you have fire insurance for your house. Same idea. The numbers are just about figuring out the fair numbers.
Eric Hammer
Nov 11 2021 at 6:33pm
It has been a long time since I looked at what we pay for home fire insurance, but as I recall it is really, REALLY cheap. This site says it averages about 1300$ a year for a 250,000$ house. That covers more than fire, of course, and covers the contents of the home as well as the structure, but it’s a good upper bound. So something less than 0.5% a year. I am not sure any of the popular climate change mitigation schemes outside of maybe “Nuclear all the way” come close to that.
J Mann
Nov 9 2021 at 11:31am
Bryan, have you changed your mind at all about whether we might want to invest more in researching geoengineering?
It seems to me that W&W have a point that geoengineering is going to be a public good – I appreciate that you’re on the libertarian side, but it seems to me that if we’re likely to see geoengineering take off over the next few decades, it’s worth investing some money to study the most effective and least harmful paths for that.
Daniel Reeves
Nov 9 2021 at 11:52am
Ha, I actually asked Bryan if I could still win the bet on a technicality if Wagner and Weitzman inadvertently convinced him we should pursue stratospheric aerosol injection (what they mostly mean by geoengineering in the book). He correctly pointed out that he’s long been sympathetic to geoengineering and the bet required him to do a 180.
To quote from my forthcoming reply (thanks Bryan!) on the geoengineering question:
In the meantime, I’ve read a persuasive-sounding pitch for geoengineering by David Keith, which also explains why we should think of it as a last resort. From that plus my recollection from Climate Shock:
Geoengineering doesn’t mitigate ocean acidification
It worsens air pollution
It increases climate variance and extreme weather events
It damages the ozone layer
Unknown unknowns
David S
Nov 13 2021 at 4:09pm
This depends on the version of geoengineering that you do. When I looked at the problem back when they offered a prize for a solution, here’s what I came up with:
Go to Antarctica with a bunch of purpose built trucks and every day go out and plow/brush the snow and ice into (relatively) smooth ice. This lowers the emissivity significantly, and lowers the temperature during the winter to below the freezing point of CO2. The CO2 will then fall like snow out of the atmosphere, and then the trucks with brushes collect it, put it in barrels, and bury the barrels under the ice.
Has the advantage of directly removing the CO2, is extremely cheap compared to other extraction methods, and could be easily ended if we decide that it’s a bad idea. Also, no one lives there so it could be easily done politically if we decided to. And (since I am a startup guy), it has some really easy to implement MVP versions to test everything that have essentially zero chance of messing anything up.
My prediction: this will never be attempted, because the people screaming don’t actually want the problem solved. They just want to scream.
If I’m wrong, and someone does want to attempt it, let me know! 🙂
Craig
Nov 9 2021 at 11:50am
I’ll bet anyone any amount that they can’t change my mind on any subject. When money is on the line, I can be really obstinate.
David Henderson
Nov 9 2021 at 4:45pm
LOL.
nobody.really
Nov 10 2021 at 1:44pm
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6; repr. University of California Press (1994), at 109.
Jose Pablo
Nov 9 2021 at 1:32pm
The whole climate change policy revolves around one premise:
“Governments are good at solving problems”
I don’t think there is a most definitely and completely falsified premise than this one.
I find this particularly striking:
“Everything we know about how humans behave, and how they don’t, leads us to believe that— unless political leaders muster the courage to act, decisively and soon— the world will inevitably be facing some painful choices.”
Everything we know about how political leaders behave lead me to believe that they will keep subsidizing fossil fuels (as they do now at an unbelievable level) and that they will keep pocketing a substantial part of the “funds” expropriated to the rest of us and earmarked to “fight” climate change.
And yes, geoengineering is a NO solution since it does not need governments (at least not that much, after all, everything needs governments, even packaging oranges).
For the very same reasons Social Clubs that so effectively procured Health Services to their members were banned: they did not require government intervention.
If “political leaders [should] muster the courage to act, decisively and soon, coming up with solutions to this problem, you can be sure that we are doomed.
Exactly the same that they were doomed, despite the remarkable presence and abundance of “political leaders”, in the Mao’s China of the Great Leap Forward, or in the Castro’s Cuba “Zafra de los 10 millones” or in the “war against homelessness” California or ….
Some beliefs are really elusive to discouragement.
Mark Crankshaw
Nov 9 2021 at 6:04pm
Excellent!
Russell N Nelson
Nov 11 2021 at 12:27am
Friendly Societies were banned in the UK? I don’t know of any such equivalent in the US that was banned, per se. They were simply out-competed by government policies that favored employer-funded health care. E.g. the Sons of Norway, which used to be a health insurance cooperative, but is now just a social club.
JG
Nov 9 2021 at 1:47pm
What IS Bryan’s opinion about climate policy after all? Is there a post that lays it all out?
A Country Farmer
Nov 9 2021 at 4:37pm
This bet approach could be a clever marketing technique of getting influencers to read their books and spread the message 😀
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 10 2021 at 6:10am
I do not understand why the book did not persuade Caplan that a revenue neutral tax on net emissions would not be a good idea.
Errikos
Nov 10 2021 at 7:01pm
“Predictions of disaster are almost always wrong”
This is difficult to judge. Geologic history proves that most animals go extinct. Also Neanderthals (if they were able to talk) could have made the same statement. Still we are the only human species/race left. If we restrict ourselves to the agricultural revolution, even if our species has survived, a lot of populations have been wiped out. Finally, if we look at the time since the industrial revolution only, which is probably the most relevant for climate change, it seems to be a very short time to draw the conclusion that disasters are very rare.
Mactoul
Nov 11 2021 at 9:49pm
While disasters may not be rare, successful predictions of disasters are rare.
When I predict famine by drought for next year but famine by flood, it is not a success.
rsm
Nov 13 2021 at 12:42am
Doesn’t geologic history also show the earth thriving in 15-degree warmer climates?
《Geologists and paleontologists have found that, in the last 100 million years, global temperatures have peaked twice. One spike was the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse roughly 92 million years ago, about 25 million years before Earth’s last dinosaurs went extinct. […] champsosaurs (crocodile-like reptiles) lived as far north as the Canadian Arctic, and warm-temperature forests thrived near the South Pole.》
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been
Mark Bahner
Nov 11 2021 at 5:58pm
Who says there is a 10 percent chance of eventual warming of 6 degrees Celsius or more? And by that I mean, what peer-reviewed publication has ever estimated that there is more than a 10 percent chance of eventual warming of 6 degrees Celsius or more?
The longevity of atmospheric carbon dioxide is entirely dependent the cost for humans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and the willingness of humans to bear that cost. In fact, a reasonable analysis of the likely costs of removing future CO2 and the world GDP in the future indicates that removing CO2 to the pre-industrial concentration of approximately 280 ppm in a few decades, starting in the year 2100, would be trivial (less than 10 percent of the gross world product annually for 2-5 decades).
Global warming is not “irreversible”
Eric B Rasmusen
Nov 12 2021 at 7:27am
Geoengineering really is much less risky than other climate policies. It is easily reversible. Just stop putting aerosols up, for example. If you’ve gotten everybody to invest in nuclear power instead of coal, though, and it turns out there was no need, you’re stuck having paid for nuclear power.
Zach Huitink
Nov 12 2021 at 10:10am
It seems exceedingly risky to bet on your opponent changing their mind (rather than betting on some larger outcome occurring in the future). A remarkable bet, indeed.
Perhaps he didn’t care so much about winning as he did about just getting you to read the book (and, in this sense, ought really be applauded for putting his money on the line)?
Michael Rulle
Nov 12 2021 at 4:04pm
How does one get “10”% as a probability in inferential statistics for an X% increase in temperature in Y years? That seems pretty hard. At least in more humble studies, for example, improved agricultural techniques, there can be multiple studies, eventual confirmations, and accurate predictions. Among many other sciences.
But this? It is not as if every climate scientist believes the same set of premises. So, as non-climate scientists, we need to assess all those who believe in various degrees of outcomes. How do I combine Bjorn Lomborg’s “probabilities” or opportunity costs with Reeves? We are supposed to go with the guy with the worst prediction?
And how does he get 10%? That is pretty specific. I also enjoy the human habit of tying “end times” predictions to the end of a century—it is a tick—2100—a magic year.
I think of the oddness of relativity, the super oddness of quantum mechanics—but nothing is odder than the end of the world due to the doubling of CO2—does that make it true because it is so odd?
Todd Kreider
Nov 13 2021 at 1:57pm
The recent IPCC A6 report on climate change lowered the upper bound temperature if CO2 doubles, around 2100, from 4.5C to 4.0C.
A large 2015 survey of climate scientists showed what percent of the 1860 participants what they thought the most likely temperature increase from 1950 would be. They were asked to skip this question if they didn’t know or thought not possible to know.
don’t know/unknown…..50%
less that 0.5%……………….2%
0.5C to 1.4C………………….5%
1.5C to 2.4C…………………8%
2.5C to 3.4C……………….. 26%
3.5C to 4.4C…………………6%
4.5C to 5.4C………………..2%
5.5C To 6.4C……………….0.5%
more than 6.4C…………..0.5%
upper bound:
less than 0.5C…………….1%
0.5C to 1.4C………………3%
1.5C to 2.4C…………… ..4%
2.5C to 3.4C……………..4%
3.5C to 4.4C……………10%
4.5C to 5.4C……………19%
5.5C to 6.4C…………….5%
more than 6.4C…….. .4%
p. 16
https://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/downloads/pbl-2015-climate-science-survey-questions-and-responses_01731.pdf
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